


lilac wine

by mountsky



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Breaking Up & Making Up, Friends With Benefits, Getting Together, M/M, Miscommunication, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Smoking, am I allowed to tag this as happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:01:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25284295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountsky/pseuds/mountsky
Summary: Shion slips his fingers through Adriah’s hair and he yanks.“You taste of smoke,” Adriah murmurs, his voice low, sending jolts through Shion’s stomach.“You taste like whisky,” he breathes into Adriah’s mouth. He wonders how he managed to speak through the aching lump in his throat. It hurts. It burns. He can’t pull away.-or the one where Shion comes to realise he's been running for far too long.
Relationships: Inunaki Shion/Adriah Thomas
Comments: 26
Kudos: 122





	lilac wine

**Author's Note:**

> "I know I've kissed you before, but I didn't do it right" - [pink in the night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-B5yr2zyY0) by mitski
> 
> "lilac wine, I feel unready for my love" - [lilac wine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PC68rEfF-o) by jeff buckley
> 
> "could it be that I'm searching too hard/ I wish you'd come and find me" - [nothing without you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbqr3xKzI_0) by tanerélle

“Can we talk?”

The cigarette in Shion’s fingers almost drops to the tarmac beneath their shoes. 

At first he thinks he’s dreaming again. He thinks the quiet lilt of Adriah’s voice drifting over him is another night, with the moonlight spilling over the sheets and the broad expanse of his shoulders. He thinks, or maybe he wishes- He wishes they weren’t here, outside the bar with too much unsaid between them. He wishes Adriah didn’t look so hopeful. 

“Sure,” Shion murmurs, bringing the cigarette back to his lips and letting his gaze wander over all of Adriah. It takes awhile, not only because he’s tall, impossibly tall, but because its been weeks since they tried to end things and Shion has to figure out how to navigate the reality of an Adriah existing without Shion in his arms. 

It’s difficult. 

He looks good, he always looks good. His suit pants aren’t tailored, he’s wearing boots that Shion knows are his most formal footwear. No tie and collar creased and its too easy to remember Shion’s fingers smoothing out the wrinkles and fastening the tie he could never get right for him. It’s too easy and it hurts too much. 

“How have you been?” 

“Fine,” Shion shoots back, “You?”

Adriah has the audacity to sigh, and his sigh has the audacity to sound pained. 

Shion snorts. Flicks the cigarette to the ground and stubs it beneath his toe. He pulls out another, lights it, and tries to will his fingers to stop shaking. 

“Since when do you smoke?” Adriah asks into the gaping space between them. 

Shion’s breath stutters and he blinks through the inability to articulate the _since you left_ that burns through his lungs and leaves him gasping for air. 

He looks Adriah in the eyes then, neck straining since he has to look up. It’s nine pm in the evening and somehow it still looks like he’s staring at the sun. 

It burns. It all burns. Adriah reaches out and Shion is still blinking light spots from his eyes when those big gentle hands cup his face. 

His touch burns through the layers and layers of his carefully taped heart. His touch feels like electricity and it jolts Shion. 

“You shouldn’t smoke,” he whispers, as though he has any right. He’s close enough to kiss. He’s close enough to punch in the face. 

Shion lips part. He breathes in and purposefully blows the smoke into his ex-boyfriend’s face. 

He takes the few seconds to try and calm down as Adriah coughs and waves the smoke from around him. Adrenaline is running through his veins and it would be a welcome reprieve from the numbness if it wasn’t because of Adriah. He’s so sick of his life revolving around Adriah. 

He’s so sick of his life revolving around hesitant conversations about Adriah, he’s so sick of ignoring the group chat whenever his name pops up, he’s so sick of staring at the expanse of his back and clenching his fingers to stop from reaching out.

“Don’t touch me,” he says because if he doesn’t he’ll lean into that touch and he’ll fall, head first, heart first, into the all encompassing ache that Adriah grips him with. 

And they’d do it all over again. 

Adriah swallows when he pulls back. Shion follows the bob of his throat, eyes lingering on the sharp jut of his jaw and he takes a deep breath.

He hates that he still-

Wants. 

“What do you want, Adriah?” Shion says, sighs really.

Adriah takes one step. Another. Until all of him is leaning down into Shion’s space. Shion almost chokes on it. Adriah is like the sun. 

He’s reminded of the beginning. Staring into the sun. When Shion had said, between breathless gasps, that they shouldn’t be doing this. And Adriah had quietly read the tilt of his hips, the curve of his smile, the desperation in his voice, and given him everything he hadn’t known he wanted. 

It’s happening again. Adriah looks at the downward tilt of his lips, at the pain etched in his face. And this time, when he leans in, when his big hand cups Shion’s face, when their lips meet- 

Shion gives in. 

He’s so tired. 

He parts his lips and Adriah is there, breaking down the lines of his defences effortlessly, burrowing inside him and reclaiming the space he’d abandoned. He spreads through Shion’s senses like wildfire, and it hurts, it burns. Shion hates it. Hates him. 

He slips his fingers through Adriah’s hair and he yanks. 

“You taste of smoke,” Adriah murmurs, his voice low, sending jolts through Shion’s stomach. There’s a distant part of him that’s aware that anyone could see them, any drunk could stumble outside and see the secret they’d been keeping for years, the secret that threatened to ruin the team on so many different occasions. 

But there’s a part of him that shivers, trembles, screams from the shock of Adriah after having been so numb and. So cold. 

Hands on his waist. Big hands. Warm hands. Where they belong, a vicious part of him whispers. Where they should always belong. 

“You taste like whisky,” he breathes into Adriah’s mouth. He wonders how he managed to speak through the aching lump in his throat. It hurts. It burns. He can’t pull away. The feeling of belonging settles deep in his bones, tethers him to the ground, to the earth, forces him to confront the fact that he’s still not over Adriah. He hasn’t even tried to be over Adriah. 

Big hands around him. The warm comforting scent of linen. And Adriah. Adriah pressing their bodies together, pressing them flush, kissing him like Shion is the very air he breathes. 

“Shion, I-“

Shion bites down on his lip, stopping the words before they can fall and ruin this, break this tentative, desperate thing between them. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to think. He’s been tired for so long. 

Shion wants to ache, Shion wants to hurt, Shion wants to burn. 

“Toilet,” he manages, pulling away and breathing heavily. Adriah looks wrecked. His carefully styled hair mussed, his lips bitten and swollen. Cheeks ruddy. 

A dark rush of pride slithers its way through Shion’s body. That dark part of him that had ruined this in the first place. The part of him that had wanted to sink his teeth into Adriah and never let him go. He should pull away. He should stop this. He should tell that pride to fuck off. He should remember to bring this up in his fortnightly therapy sessions.

But they aren’t doing whatever it was they were doing anymore.

Shion hasn’t slept properly for days. Shion aches. 

And he’s nothing without Adriah. 

Even like this. Even broken, and wrong and twisted, even aching and burning and screaming. He needs Adriah with every fibre of his being. 

* * *

When Shion keens, legs wrapped around Adriah’s waist, Adriah answers with hands on his waist. When he hisses and claws down Adriah’s back, Adriah answers with a bite on the tender skin of his collar bone. When he trembles, shivers, cries, Adriah thrusts deeper, harder, faster. 

When Shion spits “I hate you,” in between their lips, Adriah burns him with his feverish kisses, licks into his mouth, crawls into the broken pieces of Shion’s carefully taped heart and sets his body alight. 

Shion’s eyes roll to the back of his head. 

This is nothing like it used to be. There’s nothing tender about the way that Adriah hikes his legs up, there’s nothing gentle about the cold of the bathroom tile against his back. There’s nothing soft about the bruises that litter his hips in the shape of Adriah’s big warm hands. 

“I love you,” Adriah hisses and it sounds like a threat. 

* * *

There’s no saving Adriah’s outfit. Not really. His shirt is so crumpled it looks like paper. 

And yet, Shion reaches up. Carefully smoothes out his collar. Fastens his tie. 

Doesn’t look at Adriah. 

His legs feel shaky. His lips throb. Every step is fire, blistering hot and relentless. 

He turns and looks at the mirror, it’s easier than staring into Adriah’s eyes and trying to make sense of the depths of them. He doesn’t think he’ll ever understand Adriah. At first glance, its easy io take Adriah’s first impression and run with it. Hapless. Beautiful and kind. Sweet. 

At second glance, if you’re lucky enough to let your gaze linger, you realise that Adriah is the tip of the iceberg. He’s too much to comprehend at once. So Shion glances again. And again. And Again. And he falls in love, with every inch of him that every glance reveals. 

He’s always been just too much to comprehend. Too much to hold on to. Too much to love. Adriah is the kind of love that ruins him. 

And yet here he is. Again. 

In the mirror, Shion watches as Adriah’s hands (big, warm) slip around his waist and wrap him tightly enough to choke him of his air. He rolls his head, left, right, and lets his fall back against Adriah’s chest. 

He doesn’t try and pull away. 

Even though he knows he should. 

Even though every second in Adriah’s presence burns. 

* * *

It’s not love. 

Shion tells himself this over and over again. 

He tells himself this as he sits on the bed beside Adriah, legs drawn to his body and fingers tracing the marks he’d left down Adriah’s back. 

Love is sweet. Love is soft and tender. Love is gentle.

Love doesn’t hurt. Love doesn’t feel like he’d swallowed the embers of the sun every time he looks at Adriah Tomas. 

It’s not love, he tells himself this. 

“I don’t love you,” he whispers as he kisses Adriah’s forehead, fingers pushing aside his bangs to feel the heat of his skin burn Shion’s lips.

Adriah (hapless, beautiful) wraps his arms around Shion’s naked body, sheets pooling by the narrow taper of his waist, and pulls him into his embrace (big, warm), kisses Shion’s eyelashes, his cheekbones, his lips. And it hurts (burns). 

It’s not love. 

* * *

Sometimes the emptiness makes him feel as though he doesn’t exist. As though his body is temporary, fleeting and wrong. 

When he comes home and his apartment holds the faintest whispers of Adriah- When he comes home to the empty apartment without the faintest whispers of Adriah. 

That’s when it feels like he’ll break. 

He moves from the door way. To the shower. He sits under the cold spray and sobs. Tears hot as they track down his cheeks, mingling with the iciness of the water. He’ll only remember a little too late that he hasn’t changed yet. That he has bruises that need attending to, that he’s still in his uniform. That he hasn’t eaten all day. That he hasn’t slept for longer. 

It’s all so empty without Adriah and it hurts. 

* * *

“I hate you,” Shion hisses into Adriah’s mouth. Only it’s not a hiss, it’s not even a whisper. It’s a sob and its torn from his throat without his permission. And Adriah, with his big warm hands, pushes his head back, strokes his hair from Shion’s face. 

They’re back here again. Even though they’d promised that last time that there would be no next time. 

Here they are, again, staring into eachothers eyes, teetering on the cliffs edge.

And in the depths of those eyes Shion can see it, can see everything they can’t say to each other just yet. 

His stomach plummets and Adriah lets him look away. He doesn’t know how many times Adriah has let him run from this. 

He doesn’t know how long he can keep running from the sun. It seems impossible. But everything about loving Adriah is impossible- 

“It’s not love,” Shion will sigh and Adriah will let Shion lie to himself one more time.

* * *

“Harder.” 

“No.”

“What?”

“No.”  
  
“Harder, Adriah--”  
  
“No. Like this. Only like this.”

* * *

It feels like it’s been hours. In reality, the time from when Shion had quietly entered Adriah’s apartment using the spare key he was only supposed to use under emergency circumstances, the time from padding across the marble to kneeling onto Adriah’s bed, the time from letting his body move without thought and pressing his lips to the small dip of Adriah’s back, from feeling the warmth and solidness of him beneath his fingers, to needing him, missing him, drinking to forget him, being unable to forget him- to this, to now, to being laid out on Adriah’s big bed, splayed out under Adriah’s big hands, with those long, viscous familiar fingers easing in and out of him and filling up the crevices of pain he’d left behind. 

It had only been maybe half an hour. 

Time barely exists around Adriah. He can’t quantify it. When Adriah crooks his fingers, Shion moans, long and drawn out and aching for seconds. Or maybe minutes. Who knows. 

“Shion,” Adriah whispers. His bangs are falling over his eyes, they look silver in the moonlight. Shion tilts his hips and reaches up to cup his face. 

“Shion, I love you,” Adriah breathes and it doesn’t sound like a threat. 

He can’t say it. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to say. What Adriah is asking of him is too much to comprehend. Trust. 

“I- I can’t,” he chokes out, breath stuttering alongside the shallow thrusts of Adriah’s fingers. Grounding him. In and out. Drawing him back, present, when he feels like he might fly away. 

“I know you’re scared,” Adriah says, pulling his fingers out and leaving Shion without the only tether to the present. He loses himself. Refuses to look at that earnest, beautiful face. Refuses to acknowledge the truth in Adriah’s words. 

But Adriah won’t let him look away. Adriah won’t let him run away. Not this time. 

He doesn’t know when he lost the ground beneath his feet. It could’ve been when he’d felt Adriah’s tears, hot and pressing into the crook of his neck as they were fucking one week ago. It could’ve been crying out Adriah’s name in a dirty bar bathroom. It could’ve been when he’d walked in and spent minutes just watching him sleep. Adoring him. 

Or it could’ve been absent the entire time. 

A terrifying, choking, realisation that has his entire being shaking in rebellion. There’d never been anything but Adriah.

Big warm hands cup his face. Adriah presses their foreheads together and the air is hot and heavy between them. 

When Adriah slides into him, he swallows Shion’s desperate whimper with a vicious grounding kiss. 

Shion’s untethered, flying. And all of a sudden the sun blinds him, burns him. Holds him in all its glory. 

“I know you’re scared,” Adriah kisses along his jaw, up to his ear and down to worry a mark into Shion’s skin, and Shion’s so tired of being scared. “But I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.” 

Shion breaks. 

Shatters. Looks into Adriah’s eyes and feels time stop. 

Adriah is inside him, all around him, the ground beneath his feet, the sun in his sky, the threads tying his heart, his- Everything. 

“Adriah,” Shion manages through the wreck of emotions bubbling up his throat. He throws out the name in wild desperation. An untamable monster. And Adriah, Adriah, big warm hands, the sun, his everything- Adriah catches the words he doesn’t say and he smiles, running his nose tenderly along Shion’s jaw and kissing the salt of his tears from his cheek. 

“I love you, Shion.” He can't run from Adriah's thrusts, deep and demanding. 

It’s too much. Adriah whispers three words and his body convulses, tightening, taut and snapping. And when he lets go. When he lets go of everything he’s ever known, Adriah is there to catch him, to hold him, to burn him and hurt him and love him and ruin him with everything that he is. 

He doesn’t know where he ends and Adriah begins. For the first time, Shion lets himself exist as one half of a whole. As one half of Adriah’s everything. 

He’s right, it’s terrifying. But Adriah’’s there. And hasn’t he always been? 

Shion loses himself and Adriah tethers him with only the blistering heat of his touch. 

* * *

He wakes up later feeling changed. Part of him wonders how long he’s been living in cliche. Part of him wonders how he’d held the ache of loving Adriah for so long and so deeply in the rotten cavity of his bones. 

The balcony doors are open, the curtains billow in the breeze. Adriah is not by his side but his shadow falls on the bed from where he stands, in only his sweatpants, shoulders hunched over the raiingl. 

Shion’s changed. 

And now, he can see Adriah’s quiet patience for what it is. He can see the pain he’s caused. He pulls on Adriah’s t-shirt, loose around the shoulders, stinking of the scent of them together. Then he pads outside to the balcony, the door clicking softly behind him. 

Adriah turns to look, and Shion is struck dumb. The sun, illuminated by the moon. He doesn’t smile but his eyes are soft, fluttering closed as he brings a cigarette to his lips. 

“Since when do you smoke?” Shion finds himself whispering. 

The chasm between them feels unnatural now. And so he steps closer until their arms brush against each other. Until he can reach out and pinch the cigarette from Adriah with his thumb and finger. Adriah’s strong hands find his hips and they stare at each other for another one of those moments that feel like eternity. 

“Since you,” Adriah says finally, jolting Shion with the transparency of his words. “Since waiting for you.” 

“You’ve waited a long time,” Shion says, voice shaking, breath leaving his body in a rush. He’s always trembling around Adriah. Until- Tonight. Until he let himself open up, let Adriah find him, let himself be loved so intensely it shattered him to pieces and pieced him back together with those big gentle hands. 

“I’ve waited a lifetime, Shion,” Adriah’s voice is a quiet lilt, drifting over his senses. And Shion closes his eyes, breathing in the scent of stale smoke, of linen, of the sickly sweet honesty in his words. He lets Adriah fill every crevice of his cold aching being. He lets the heat, the light, overwhelm him. 

And Shion smiles.

When it comes, it’s as quiet as the bond between them. When it comes all Shion has to do is part his lips. When it comes it’s relief and its freedom and it’s the beginning. 

Shion cups Adriah’s face, his hands cold and gentle. Adriah closes his eyes and Shion knows the kiss to his wrist is coming before Adriah even moves. 

“I’m here now,” Shion breathes, watching the city lights play along the sharp jut of Adriah’s jaw, watching his eyes fly open to stare at Shion in bewilderment. 

Shion wonders how it had taken him so long to realise. 

“I love you.” 

The cigarette falls to the tarmac beneath them. The light goes out. And there is only Adriah wrapping his arms around Shion. And there is only Shion wrapping his arms around Adriah, pressing his face to his neck, holding him as he falls apart, tethering the sun to the universe and soothing those aching breathless sobs of relief. His fingers card through Adriah’s hair. Adriah loves him. 

Adriah loves him and it doesn’t feel so scary. 

-

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> let me know what u thought!!!! :)))


End file.
